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Welcome back to Representing the Professional Athlete.
It's my privilege and pleasure to welcome via Skype my good friend
Professor Ron Katz who runs the Santa Clara Sports Law Institute.
Ron, welcome to our program.
Thanks for having me, Peter.
>> Absolutely, we want to hear all about your program.
Take us from the beginning when you began the institute.
And how it's lead to the Safer Soccer Initiatives and
some of the accomplishments that you've achieved through your institute.
>> Well it started out, I had won a big case on behalf of 2,000 retired
NFL players in their publicity rights.
So as a result of that, I was very deeply into the field of
sports law and I started teaching at Santa Clara.
And, of course, at that time people began to notice
what a big business sports was, so larger law firms like my law firm,
I'm at Manatt Phelps, started getting into that business.
And as often happens, there's symposia around the country on the subject.
I looked at the symposia and I said you know, I could put on a better
symposia then this- >> [LAUGH]
>> Just because I know so many people.
And we started with that.
Our first speaker was Jim Brown, one of the great football players, and
we had Allan Schwarz of the New York Times and
the managing partner of the San Francisco Giants, and it just went on and on.
And we put on a few of those, and
what we found was that what interested people most was the ethical issues.
So, for example, concussions or performance enhancing drugs or
use of people's images without authorization, cheating.
I mean, there's no shortage of ethical issues in sports, as you know.
So from that we said well, we're at Santa Clara University,
it's a Jesuit institution, and ethics is part of their core mission.
So we decided that we would start an Institute of Sports Law and Ethics, and
I thought that we would have competition.
But when I looked out there, there were none.
>> [LAUGH] >> We're the only one in the world that
focused exclusively on sports and ethics.
So, as time went by,
we revisited the concussion subject which is a huge subject.
And of course, the initial attention was on football and hockey.
But we focused on soccer, and we brought in a group of doctors
to speak about the dangers of heading in soccer, especially for young people.
And I asked Brandi Chastain, who's a iconic women's soccer player, played
on our championship teams and our Olympic teams, and that iconic photo of her.
I asked her if she would chair that.
And she said yes, I'm glad to do it, but her reaction was like that of many great
soccer players, that this is really not a problem if you do things correctly.
It's just a problem of technique.
So I said fine, it's a free marketplace of ideas.
Whatever idea you have is great and doctors may have other ideas.
And so she became the chairman of that group, and
I think that by educating herself with all these very distinguished doctors she came
out with a very different point of view.
Which is that there's no technique that can help a six year old who's
heading a soccer ball.
So from that, the Institute gave its,
we have an award every year called the Ethics of Sports Award.
And we awarded that to Dr. Robert Cantu and
Kristen Oinski of the, at time it was called the Sports Legacy Institute.
I think it's now called the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
And I got them together with Brandi Chastain.
That was right before the Mens World Cup.
And we decided that we would the Safer Soccer campaign.
And Brandi was the perfect person for that because first of all, she's a world-class
athlete, so what she says about athletics has a lot of credibility.
And secondly she's the mother of an eight year old boy who plays soccer.
So she has those interests at heart.
So from that came the Safer Soccer program, and I'm pleased to report that as
of yesterday, reported in today's New York Times,
that there's a huge settlement of a lawsuit that's out there.
And now the US Soccer is on board for
greatly diminishing heading for children under 14 years old.
It's a tremendous victory.
>> Tremendous, we want to plumb the depths of that wonderful settlement.
But let's go back to sort of representing the pre-professional athlete.
Here and now, how will proper technique and no headers prior to the age of 14,
will it advance, detract from, or
add to the capacity of Brandi's son to become a professional soccer player?
What's the view on that?